Andy Grove: High Output Management

The highest leverage point for managers is choosing tasks - there are infinite things you and your team can do - which are the high leverage tasks?

Premise: as an item moves through the production process it gets more valuable. 

Corollary: Detect and fix any problem in the production process at the lowest value stage possible. Thus, we should find the rotten egg as it’s being delivered from the supplier rather than permitting the customer to find it. 

stagger chart for stacked monthly forecasts. Works best for economic forecasts. Look into it if I need. 

A manager should be measured on outputs, which is the output of their team. 

Activities that go into the outputs, where you should increase productivity or add leverage wherever possible (and as a meta point, you can shift your activity set itself to be higher output to be more productive):

• Decision-making
• Gathering information (people in the company, outside the company, reports, customers/customer complaints)
• Nudges (to someone else’s decision, Grove says 12:1 ratio to nudges you give vs. decisions you make, a highly leveraged nudge is a white paper or memo)
• Motivating
• Role model (talk about your feelings and values in front of large groups, work visibly, work one on one with people)
• Training

How to increase the productivity:

• batching similar tasks
• Viewing your calendar as a production line and reorder to remove limiting steps. Most people use their calendars as a repository of "orders" that come in. Someone throws an order to a manager for his time, and it automatically shows up on his calendar. 1) You should move toward the active use of your calendar, taking the initiative to fill the holes between the time-critical events with non-time-critical though necessary activities. 2) You should say "no" at the outset to work beyond your capacity to handle.
• Have inventory projects - discretionary projects to increase your group’s productivity long-term. Additional plus: you won’t spend your free time meddling in subordinates work. 

There is an especially efficient way to get information, much neglected by most managers. That is to visit a particular place in the company and observe what's going on there. Why should you do this? Think of what happens when somebody comes to see a

manager in his office. A certain stop-and-start dynamics occurs when the visitor sits down, something socially dictated. While a two-minute kernel of information is exchanged, the meeting often takes a half hour. But if a

manager walks through an area and sees a person with whom he has a two-minute concern, he can simply stop, cover it, and be on his way. Ditto for the subordinate when he initiates conversation. Accordingly, such visits are an extremely effective and efficient way to transact managerial business.

Leverage depends on 

• timing (right before a decision vs. way too early nobody is working on it or after the decision trying to fix ambiguities and people going in random directions)
• Reducing negative leverage (e.g., arriving unprepared to a meeting, if you are in a bad mood it bleeds into your team quickly,  putting off a difficult decision that affects other people, giving detailed steps given your knowledge of the subordinates responsibilities rather than letting them take care of it/micromanaging)
• Giving feedback (takes you a short time but affects a subordinate for a long time)
• Use standard products for tasks that pop up over time. A big example of this: reducing interruptions - usually from people outside your team but whose work your work influences - like marketing to sales. Make a standard product for the main types of requests you get, so you can send it over or delegate it to a team member to take care of. 

Management should vary based on task maturity (a function of: how often has a subordinate encountered that specific task/situation you have given them, how important is the task, and how quickly things are changing in the job/task area). 

If low - choose to have a weekly one on one. One on ones should last an hour minimum. It should be in or near your subordinates office (notice are they organized, notice if they are interrupted). Set expectations that this is the subordinates meeting, they set the agenda, and have them send an outline for the meeting beforehand. Tasks they might want to pick for the agenda: performance figures that signal trouble, “anything important that happened since the last meeting”, potential problems. 

As task maturity increases, you can be more loose: meet less, do a minimal random quality inspection

Task-relevant maturity

When the TRM is low, the most effective approach is one that offers very precise and detailed instructions, wherein the supervisor tells the subordinate what needs to be done, when, and how—a highly structured approach. 

As the TRM of the team member grows, the more effective style moves from the structured one to one more given to communication, emotional support, and encouragement, in which the manager pays more attention to the subordinate as an individual than to the task at hand. 

As the TRM becomes even greater, the effective management style changes again. Here the manager’s involvement should be kept to a minimum, and should primarily consist of making sure that the objectives towards which the subordinate are working are mutually agreed upon. 

Regardless of where the TRM is, the manager should monitor the subordinates work closely enough to avoid surprises. Remember: like an assembly line, you do the have to test every product to have adequate quality control. 

Idea: Make a central “problems list” for the company and send it out on friday for problems that don’t have a clear solution, as well as (sub boards, names of people in charge?) to collect ideas. This way you harness the genius of different departments and weak ties/random connections.

We tend to think the what when how management mode isn’t one an enlightened manager should use, so we tend to avoid it until we are mired in serious chaos. A tactful manager can use this mode when the situation calls for it. A tenured associate can have a low TRM for a new activity. Additionally, the working environment or market conditions can change in a day or an hour, resulting in a new TRM, and a new most effective management style for the tactful manager.

Common management problems you can look out for:

Sometimes a manager throws out suggestions to a subordinate who receives them as marching orders. 

Level of friendship (not understanding the tradeoffs) - I think I am ok here - #2 in the example

In fact, there are pluses and minuses here. If the subordinate is a personal friend, the supervisor can move into a communicating management style quite easily, but the what-when-how mode becomes harder to revert to when necessary. It's unpleasant to give orders to a friend. I've seen several instances where a supervisor had to make a subordinate-friend toe a disciplinary line. In one case, a friendship was destroyed; in another, the supervisor's action worked out because the subordinate felt, thanks to the strength of the social relationship, that the supervisor was looking out for his (the subordinate's) professional interests.

Everyone must decide for himself what is professional and appropriate here. A test might be to imagine yourself delivering a tough performance review to your friend. Do you cringe at the thought? If so, don't make friends at work. If your stomach remains unaffected, you are likely to be someone whose personal relationships will strengthen work relationships. (Here man, here’s how you can get better. I expect it)

Decision making problems and solutions

The ideal decision making process has 3 steps

1. Free discussion
2. Resulting in a clear decision 
3. With full support

A main problem in free discussion is the phenomenon where people “hang back”. People hang back to wait to see what their superiors say, then support that position. 

A main problem in a clear decision result is “clear”. This can create buy in for support to have a everyone involved in the wording and exactly what is being defined, as well as what next steps are.

A second problem is peer group syndrome, where a group of peers talks in a circle, getting nowhere. This can be solved with peer plus one, since middle managers often have trouble expressing their views forcefully / sticking their necks out to move from discussion —> decision. 

A second problem in full support is that some people cannot commit to back a decision in which they do not agree. But an organization does not live by its members agreeing with one another at all times about everything. It lives instead by people committing to support the decisions and the moves of the business. All a manager can expect is that the commitment to support is honestly present, and this is something he can and must get from everyone. 

Interesting: society lauds athletes who work all the time, but if your job is “work” you are a workaholic. How can we make work like sports, and thus, more likely to be “lauded”?

Endow work with the characteristics of competitive sports. And the best way to get that spirit into the workplace is to establish some rules of the game and ways for employees to measure themselves. Eliciting peak performance means going up against something or somebody. Let me give you a simple example. For years the performance of the Intel facilities maintenance group, which is responsible for keeping our buildings clean and neat, was mediocre, and no amount of pressure or inducement seemed to do any good. We then initiated a program in which each building's upkeep was periodically scored by a resident senior manager, dubbed a "building czar." The score was then compared with those given the other buildings. The condition of all of them dramatically improved almost immediately.

Nothing else was done; people did not get more money or other rewards. What they did get was a racetrack, an arena of competition.

Main problems with performance reviews to avoid:

• review comments too general
• Mixed messages (inconsistent with rating or dollar amount)
• No indication of how to improve
• Negatives avoided
• Supervisor didn’t know my work
• Only recent performance considered
• Surprises

Its best to give a written performance review first. They will digest. Then meet one on one. Be sure to discuss past performance, feelings, and advice to improve. 

Interviewing:

Types of Q’s: 

Technical/Skills

• describe some projects 
• what are your weaknesses

What He Did With Knowledge 

• past achievements 
• past failures

Discrepancies

• what did you learn from failures
• problems in current position

Operational Values

• why are you ready for new job 
• why should my company hire you 
• why should engineer be chosen for marketing 
• most important college course/project